July 2013

Monday, 29 July 2013

Crime and Punishment! The perfect title for the fugitive stuck in transit lounge limbo at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. And maybe, for the first time in his young life, Edward Snowden has time to read it.

Who, I wonder, dreamed up this stunt? Snowden himself? In a moment of despair, maybe, because you’d think he’d prefer a copy of Born Free, in which the pet lioness Elsa eventually returns to the wild. Or was it Snowden’s lawyers, the Russian ones or those from Wikileaks? Probably neither, if they have any interest in maintaining his morale. Or, most delicious of all, could it have come from Russian President Vladimir Putin, who’s been so adroitly toying with Snowden?

The Death Penalty Obstacle

At any rate, we probably can’t attribute the witty book idea to anyone in the super somber Obama administration, although someone in the Justice Department may have registered the title on a deeper level. To wit: a country that doesn’t allow capital punishment isn’t likely to hand Snowden over to U.S. prosecutors raring to exact the severest of possible punishments. By and large, as compared to Russia or China, I’d rather be tried in American courts, but losers in America can be fried, hanged or dosed to death. In Russia, where Snowden currently languishes, they simply get mistreated.

And so, speaking of crime and punishment, did some especially bright young lawyer in the U.S. Justice Department figure out that Putin might find it easier to march this guy onto the next flight to New York if the worst he’d face were a mere 1000 years or so of jail time? Anyhow, that offer—no death penalty—is now on the table. Let’s see if Putin bites.

Here’s a further bonus for the Obama administration: other countries may be less tempted to tender offers of refuge, whether on compassionate grounds or simply to stick it to the U.S., if the guy’s allowed to slouch around in unflattering orange for the next 50 years, a real possibility, given Snowden’s age. Not quite seriously, I find myself wondering if a white collar jail would be worse punishment for Snowden than being marooned in a cyber backwater like Equador—unless he can count on a regular supply of coca leaves to alleviate his boredom.

Fight or Flight?

In any event, for Snowden as for Bradley Manning, the whistle-blower vs. traitor debate continues. Manning, of course, was smart enough to sit tight, whereas Snowden fantasized the possibility of escaping the long arm of U.S. law. Yes, I understand the urge, the instinct, to flee. But I was astounded to learn that he had fled first to Hong Kong, whose authorities would never shelter a dissident objectionable to Beijing, and then got on a flight that landed him more or less in Russian hands. Moscow, like Beijing, has zero interest in allowing foreign libertarians to wander around the country finding (and trumpeting) fault.

Flight was perhaps a naive move, but it was also a move that puts Snowden in greater jeopardy of the traitor label. The U.S. was already quarreling with China over cyber spying and piracy, and Russia-U.S. relations in the national security sphere are nearly as rocky.

Meanwhile, lawfully or not, Edward Snowden has done the rest of us a favor. He has earned the gratitude of the many Americans who have become increasingly concerned about the extent to which this and the previous administration have kept us in the dark, partly through non-disclosure, partly through deceit, regarding the regime of total surveillance and sophisticated data mining under which we are now apparently living. There have been hints of secret snooping, of course, bits and pieces that have found their way into the more thoughtful mainstream publications. But thanks to Snowden, we have a more complete picture of what’s been going on. The days of denial and double-talk are over.

Americans fear terrorism, partly because wariness makes sense, more because they’ve been subjected to an unending fear campaign by their own leaders, but they fear the Big Brother state even more. Congress may have reauthorized the more controversial sections of the Patriot Act, but the debate, however brief, had to be conducted in public. This in itself was refreshing, but the discussion is far from over, especially since the Republican Party is seriously split on the issue.

For a very lucid summary of the surveillance situation that Snowden has so helpfully lifted the lid off, I’d recommend a reading of “They Know Much More Than You Think” by James Bamford in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books.

After you read that, let me suggest that you see a new film that everyone needs to see. It’s entitled Hannah Arendt, and it's about the brilliant mid 20th century German-American philosopher who outraged fellow holocaust survivors by writing Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, a book that still serves to sensitize all readers to the danger posed by bureaucrats who obey orders like puppets with no personal moral sense or conscience. The NAZI bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann contended that it was his sworn duty to rubber stamp the papers that sped Jews through his segment of the journey to Auschwitz. Buy the book in the likely event the film isn’t being shown at your local multiplex.

Seen in the lightof the Eichman trial, the Manning and Snowden cases demand an answer to this question: do we Americans want the people who work for our government to suppress their capacity for independent thought and moral outrage like modern day Adolf Eichmans? Or shall we rather be thankful and relieved when American Snowdens and Mannings jeopardize their own security to let us know how shamefully our government is treating us—or anyone else? Given the extent of the illegal surveillance and related gross abuses of the American judicial system, including preventive detention, closed courts, uncontestable evidence and secret interpretations of the law, to say nothing of torture, who has betrayed us more deeply? These young whistleblowers? Or the superiors who would be happy to see them hanged?

The recently amended Smith-Mundt Act was enacted in the
1950s supposedly to protect pristine American eyes and ears from US government
propaganda (a word made pejorative by Hitler and Stalin) but in reality the ear-plugs
and blinders came into force more to protect the interests of the Associated
Press which feared government competition to its then fledgling foreign news
business.

By the 1990s, Internet and satellite transmissions had obviated
the Smith-Mundt ban.Long before that, short-wave
radio hams throughout the US regularly accessed Voice of America broadcasts and
even on dark winter nights when I was a teenager, I could hear the VOA signal
and its Yankee Doodle Dandy fife and drum corps theme song in California on my small
transistor radio when the antenna pointed towards the northeast.The station came in just as loud and clear
then – if not clearer - than VOA did in my Moscow apartment in 1980.

How harmful is access to national public radio stations
designed to sell US foreign policies abroad to American citizens?It’s not as if the US government monopolizes
the airwaves in this country.Or that
the vast majority of Americans are going to switch the dial from the
infotainment programs or worse that they’ve become addicted to US government
newscasts or editorials aimed at explaining the US to foreigners. Fat chance.

Or that our huge commercial media conglomerates will
suddenly become divorced from their all too cozy relationships with the
government and/or opposition media handlers and report unbiased news for a
change as opposed to airing verbatim contents of the latest media blurbs from
their favorite sources that regularly scroll across reporters’ computer screens
or clog the Inbox.

Smith-Mundt the least of the problems

Nevertheless, I’ve never been convinced that a repeal or
revision of this outdated law was worth the effort.I’m not opposed to the revision but there are
far more serious questions about the dysfunctional way these radio stations are
currently governed and administered, the contents of their broadcasts, and the
languages in which they broadcast.

Why,
for instance, does the US need an unwieldy conglomeration of publicly funded separately
operated surrogate radio stations like Radio Marti or Radio Free anything -
except to appease specific Congressional constituencies and play to their
biases? This especially when the US
government can’t even muster the political will to appoint a handful of people
– let alone qualified ones – to the overarching, bipartisan Board of
International Broadcasting that supposedly sets the rules for and tone.

Tuesday, 16 July 2013

Within months after I arrived in Manila summer 1992, the US Navy
took its ships and sailed off – the first time the Philippines had been left to
fend for itself after 350 years of Spanish rule and 94 years of American
military presence.(Photo left: Subic Bay Decommissioning Ceremony, 1992 by PHKushlis)

An article in the New York Times on July 13, 2013 reported
that the US military is now looking for a more or less permanent return to the
archipelago although this time on less grandiose scale, stationing more or less
permanent US troops inside Philippine military bases as opposed to re-establishing
large, expensive stand-alone American installations of times past that were the
last US hold-overs since Philippine independence in 1946 and that had been considered
vital to US military efforts in Asia throughout the Cold War.

Increasing the support for US interests in East Asia – as
the Obama administration’s Asian pivot (or repositioning) calls for – would
very likely need to involve closer military to military relations with the
Philippines.It may also include closer
military cooperation with Vietnam and Thailand – but that's another story.

Looking at it from the Philippine defense perspective, if the
country is to respond credibly to China’s threats over the disputed South China
Sea it needs the backing of a great power.The Philippine military know that problem all too well.

Meanwhile, the Philippine military have retained close
relations with their American counter-parts through the US-Philippine Mutual
Defense Treaty. This treaty remained in force even after Subic, the last US
base in the country, was turned over to the Philippine government in fall
1992.Subic was subsequently retreaded
as a special manufacturing, economic, tourism and trade zone and has, from reports, done well.

Basically, the issue of the return of American military to
their former colony is a troubled political one for the Filipinos.On the one hand, it’s the devil you know
versus facing off the one may not.On the other hand,
there’s the complication of placating ultra-nationalist sentiment rooted in the bitter pallor of western colonialism
which has hung over the US-Philippine relationship like a threatening typhoon since the
American invasion in 1898 during the Spanish-American war.

Floyd Whaley, New York Times reporter, was right when he described
the 1992 base closure as precipitated by the Philippine Senate’s rejection of a
treaty that would have renewed the bases agreement(actually there were two US bases at the time
of the negotiations:Subic(US Navy) and Clark (US Air Force). He was
also right about the then street protests although they had ended by the time I
arrived.

After the issue was settled, by fall 1992 a number of the
protestors had come off the streets to become frequent visitors to the US Embassy’s then Thomas Jefferson
Cultural Center’s well used library in Makati.Furthermore, those of us in the public affairs section were once again
welcome on campus.Turned out these
protestors weren’t all that anti-American (a number had advanced degrees from
American universities not to mention numerous relatives in the US).But they were foremost Philippine
nationalists some grappling with a “who are we” multi-racial
identity problem as well.They saw the bases as
the last remaining remnant of western colonialism forcibly imposed on their
ancestors.

What Whaley failed to mention was that Filipino public
opinion itself, however, strongly supported the renewal of the bases agreement
and the Senate’s vote on the treaty was razor-edge close.As in the US, the Philippine Constitution
requires a 2/3rds majority vote in the Senate to approve a treaty.This one lost by one vote. At the time, with the Soviet Union’s recent demise
and China far from the economic powerhouse it is today, the Philippines faced
no real external threat so it really didn't need a big brother to provide the national security umbrella it lacked.

Times change. Today Manila's national security situation is far different.That is, if Filipinos care about
future access to potential but unexplored resources in the seabed below the
disputed islands that dot the South China Sea.This is today’s dilemma:it will be interesting to see how this round
plays out.

There's the $771.8 million spent by the Pentagon for aircraft –
including the purchase of 30 Russian helicopters – to be flown by phantom Afghan
pilots. Then the ongoing investigation of prime contractors who have apparently shorted
their subcontractors by $62 million and the continuing investigation of
contractors who have neglected to screen subcontractors who may be in bed with
the Taliban. Add in theinvestment in expensive
projects like rural hospitals the Afghans cannot sustain - and likely will not
need - not to mention questionable data from USAID and the Pentagon claiming meaningless
successes or ones not due to US government funding at all.

Senior USAID officials objected to Sopko’s
criticisms – although the Pentagon apparently has not yet been heard from –
with the objections that the IG’s investigations are too narrowly focused or ignore
important successes.

Veteran Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaram digs
deeper or at least tunnels in a different direction. He points out that the IG’s
investigations show that a US “initiative to spend millions of dollars on
construction projects in Afghanistan, originally pitched as a vital tool in the
military campaign against the Taliban, is running so far behind schedule that
it will not yield benefits until most US combat forces have departed the
country.”

Something is wrong
with this picture

Why is the US approach to so many things international that
of throwing money and expensive contractors at a problem (after having
neglected what should have been being done on a far smaller scale and at a far
cheaper price years earlier) and then to measure the results using
quantitative data that may have little or no relevance to what should have been real goals?